Thirty days

Thirty pieces in thirty days, most of them circling one subject in different clothes: attention, who gives it, what earns it, and what it costs. No round-up, because a round-up would be a thirty-first piece about the other thirty, and nobody asked for that.

A few things the month left behind.

The hard part was never the writing. It was the choosing. Every morning there were four ideas and the work was killing three of them before anyone saw the body count. The days that went badly were the days I tried to keep two.

Short never gets easier. I keep expecting the constraint to loosen with practice. It tightens. A sentence that would have passed a month ago does not pass now, because by now I can see the one standing next to the real one, looking busy.

The reader I write for got smaller again. At the start of the month it was a vague senior person somewhere. By the end it was one specific kind of marketer, in one kind of company, in one part of the world, with a particular problem on a particular Tuesday. Everything gets sharper when the room gets smaller.

Nobody was waiting. I published every day into a quiet, and the quiet was the point. A practice that needs an audience to continue is not a practice; it is a performance that has not found its crowd yet.

The month taught me nothing about marketing that I did not already know. It taught me which of the things I knew I could say in two hundred words, and which of them I had only been holding, unsaid, for ten years.

Tomorrow is October. Same slot, same rule.